No plan survives its first brush with reality

The Take a Flask logo

THIS is a story of failure, a tale of woe. It is my experience of how having what you think is the best idea in the world matters not a jot if you don’t have the wherewithal to bring it to market, to organise it and work at it. How, without those and a thousand other factors, the eureka moment counts for nothing.

Two years ago, if I wasn’t sitting on top of the world, I thought I was pretty close to it. Alive, and in a realm full of possibilities. For the past decade, I have only traded in only one thing: ideas. They are the currency of journalism and public relations (as well as plenty of other creative professions) and all that matters. It makes for some great highs and some crashing lows. There are times when you think you’re on to a world beater, and others – once their flaws have been pointed by others – that are about as much of a goer as Alan Partridge’s monkey tennis.

However, for a few sweet hours, the ego not only banks your whizz but draws out a bridge loan and cashes in on an invincibility borne of your own bedazzling brilliance. Just enough time to enjoy it before the earth comes roaring up with a bone-crushing crunch.

Take a Flask was different. Take a Flask lasted much longer. So long, in fact, that it came to be a bit of an emotional crutch. Had a bad day? Take a Flask planning. Crap meeting? TAF idea time. Especially terrible client? Start spending those TAF millions.

The idea that was going to make me the next Mark Zuckerberg began life on a particularly expensive and not very rewarding afternoon out with the kids. Having children, most of you will know, is a costly business. All that would be fine if parents and offspring were guaranteed a fine time every time they took a day out together, but that happens too infrequently in this country. We hear all the time stories of rip-offs. But too many of us accept the cost of living with a shrug. Take Starbuck’s. Two of my kids love Starbuck’s. When it gets to all four, I won’t get much change out of £25. For a round of coffees?

Too bad, shouldn’t have so many kids. But I was finding that the best days, the ones where we really enjoyed time together, were the kind of days I loved when I was a kid. A day at Rest Bay, sand in the egg sandwiches, a four-hour game of football, some moment where the dog, or one of the kids, misjudged the depth of a rockpool with a plop and the rest of us laughed about it, sometimes years afterwards.

Whereas I can’t manage an evening out without getting through a second mortgage, my wife could organise a successful invasion of Russia for under a tenner. So it struck me that there should be some kind of online resource where parents could come together and share their good days out and – more importantly – the cost. I wasn’t thinking family snaps (although that was an option, for a members’ area) but where you went, what you did, any other useful tips (public transport, free parking, good ice cream parlours) and – most importantly – a blow-by-blow account of money spent. I wanted to do features on special places, sandwich recipes, a hall of shame (M4 services at Membury was first in my gunsights), and a ton of other whizzy ideas.

I decided to involve a particularly talented designer friend. It turns out he’d had a remarkably similar idea. Over a hearty lunch and way too many lagers at the Bute Dock Hotel, we laughed our way through yet more ideas – shared picnics, nights out for dads, T-shirts, giveaways, corporate tie-ins – everything, in fact, except having a bloody clue as to how to make it all happen.

I claim the name. It came from a story that a former Welsh Woman of the year relayed to me. She told me how she’d decided to take her mum to London as a treat. After a couple of day of solid plastic fantastic bashing, she turned somewhat exasperatedly to her mother and asked how the hell she had managed to afford two-week holidays, paying for two children away. “Simple(s),” came the reply. “Wherever we went, we took a Calor Gas stove and a packet of bangers with us.”

It took me back to my childhood, days spent on North Walian beaches, North Yorkshire Moors. My mother kept a tartan flask so large that it was used as a grain silo when not on holiday with us. No matter that it lost its warmth faster than a new-born foal in a Capel Curig winter. It was a helluva better idea than bashing down a quarter of a ton in a poncey coffee bar.

Almost from the outset, we were bedevilled with time issues. My partner runs a busy design agency, and clients must come first. I was less short on time (the recession was beginning to conspire with my relative lack of business acumen to space my daily duties further apart). He pointed me in the direction of Ning, a free social network platform, and I diligently beavered away, crafting beach reviews and other bits of writing that were some way from the snappy, interactive content I had imagined.

Of course, nobody knew about it, and nobody came. I enticed around six people to join, and they came rarely more than once. And why should they? There was nothing to see. Nothing that they hadn’t read anywhere else, anyway. I didn’t have a clue how to drive traffic, either. I knew a man who did, but he ran his own small, young business and I couldn’t prevail upon him to work for nothing.

After a month of watching Facebook groups strike the zeitgeist one after the other, I called my partner and, when he found the time to call me back, he agreed we should move to Facebook. That left one large issue: it effectively robbed us of any potential revenue base. I put the group together and people clicked into it, particularly mums. But I couldn’t commit to daily updating. Even if I had the time, I didn’t have the motivation. In short, I couldn’t be arsed. Then my brother Adam dropped me an email suggesting we combine our different but compatible expertise. WalesHome.org was born, and Take a Flask went into semi-permanent retirement.

Some six months in, and I’d learned a lot of the skills that would have made TAF fly. It is very much WalesHome’s belief that when – and, more importantly, if (this is still a hobby, after all) – we commit to further platforms, they wouldn’t be built in the way that perhaps a newspaper would add a section. This is a peer-led, wiki age, and we very much want people to engage immediately with new ideas that we have.

Again, TAF came back on the development table. Yes, the other editors agreed, this was a good plan. Daran had someone in mind, to take it off our hands. But once again we were thwarted. Once again, real life kicked the idea into the long grass, and TAF went back to being an irritant, a prick of guilt every time my eye crossed it on the WalesHome to-do list.

Then, a month or so ago, there was a fundamental shift in our future plans, and I voluntarily took TAF out of the reckoning. While there might not have been a sigh of relief from the other editors, there was little protest or mourning its passing. Like a once-favourite toy, Take a Flask has gone back into the cupboard to gather dust.

But if I can’t do something with it, then perhaps somebody with a bit more about them can. So I am willing to hand it over, lock, stock and two distinctly un-smoking barrels to any enterprising individual or small gang who thinks they can make a go off it. There are two conditions: it doesn’t go to an established media organisation, certainly not for free; and whoever takes it on has to speak to my TAF partner, although I imagine that won’t be a difficult conversation.

Maybe Take a Flask was only ever a good idea in my mind. Maybe everybody else thinks its a shower, maybe its already surpassed or superseded, a Friends Reunited that never was. It certainly has no value, but that isn’t why I want to give it away. Free lies at the heart of the internet, and this is my own (very) small contribution to it. Now it’s up to others to decide whether it’s a winner.